What if a pair of wicked jaws was already yawning open behind me, about to clamp down before I even knew what hit me–
I twisted, craning my head over my shoulder to take stock of the waters behind me.
Nothing.
The most horrible nothing you could ever imagine. If you’re going to get eaten by a shark, it’s almost better to just get it over with. The anticipation is a beast all its own.
I was on my knees in the sand. Kicking up into the water, I wriggled over to the stake, clamping it in my fists and heaving upward. I pulled, yanked, wiggled it and kicked it, gaining nothing but the slightest budge. It was hammered deep into the ground, my meager strength having as much effect as a crab trying to lift an anchor.
Useless.
Skin razed from my palms, I left off, my arms quivering. Drifting up to hover above the stake, I cast about, rotating pointlessly as I sought some tool that could help me or a clever way out.
Come on, Spirit of the Deep. Give me something. The ocean had shown me favor up until this point, hadn’t it? Wasn’t it on my side, capable of flexing its mystical power and delivering me from this mess same as it had manipulated events to bring me down here to begin with?
Nothing came to me.
It was the stupidest instinct, but in the midst of my plight I was compelled suddenly to charge upward, to make a break for it and hope the anchor weighing me down would tear loose in my desperation and let me go.
I was free-swimming for five glorious seconds, and then, with a sharp pain that lanced through both my wrists, I lurched to a halt.
A cry of frustration escaped me. Then I had to glance around for sharks again, as if they might have heard my voice, as if they hadn’t already smelled the inking hunks of steak marinating all across my body.
I was toast. Crispy, charred, crunchy, blackened, buttered-up toast.
What was I even doing here, facing this horrifying, untimely doom? Whose sick idea of a joke was this?
This is no joke, Sayler. No one drugged you and staked you to the ocean floor in the middle of nowhere and tied bloody bait to you unless they wanted you dead and in the ground.
Did mermaids bury their dead?
Not the time to speculate about cultural customs, you idiot.
Probably just my mind’s way of deflecting, of trying to pretend this wasn’t happening.
But all hopes of pretending went out the window as the first beastly silhouette materialized out of the murk. It was straight out of a nightmare, seeing that infamous beady-eyed predator coming for me. His bulk went from a hazy silhouette to a silver torpedo way too quickly, cutting into my territory with bloodlust written all over his terrible battering-ram face.
And there I was in the spotlight, strayed from the bottom, isolated on a silver-platter pedestal of open water, nothing between us or behind me or at my disposal to defend myself.
I should have stayed on the freaking bottom, instead of exposing myself in the open water like the bait that I was dressed up to be.
The shark went straight for the bleeding meat, snaking toward me with open, crushing jaws. I scrambled uselessly in the water, pure reflex throwing my hands up in front of me to stave off the attack. It would have been a pointless gesture, except that it threaded the chain across the shark’s face, and by some miracle the creature’s teeth caught on the links and provided an anchor point for me to swing away from the direct line of fire. It was just as likely the shark’s force that inadvertently slung me out of the way, but I wasn’t going to question my luck.
Reeling, I struggled to regain my bearings as the shark slithered past.
A second shark followed the first, and then a third. They spawned out of the obscurity and circled me. Completely vulnerable, I could do naught but snap my head back and forth in an attempt to track their motions, looking for the next attack.
No, that wasn’t true. Think, ink you! I may have been facing impossible odds, but there were measures I could take. Desperate attempts to cheat this gruesome fate. If I wasn’t even going to try, I might as well spread my arms in welcome and let them have me. I would be a tender steak indeed, having marinated in saltwater all this time. Why make the poor things wait, mouths watering, when they would win in the end, anyway?
But I wasn’t going to go down without a fight. You are at the top of the food chain, ink it! Start acting like it!
If they were going to dine on steak tonight, they would have to earn it.
I did make a break for it in earnest, then; it was just back toward the ocean floor, rather than away to freedom in the open sea. I went hand over hand down the chain, reeling myself in because it was faster than swimming. I needed to get flat against the ground where the sharks couldn’t just snatch me out of the water like a perfectly poised carrot dangled in front of them. At least then they’d have to really graze the bottom to get at me, and would earn themselves a mouthful of sand at the same time. I could even attempt to snow-angel myself into the sand, burying myself enough that they couldn’t reach me.
It was worth a shot.
They darted in for the kill again on my way down, and only some fancy pole-dancing maneuvers using the leverage of the chain, and the fact that multiple sharks came for me at once and had to divert their course to avoid a head-on collision with one another, saved me a second time.
I understood then why my birth mother had left me on some beach to try my luck with the humans above the Surface; I didn’t stand a chance against the swift and deadly prowess of the ocean’s predators.
My pulse raced, my bruising heart threatening to explode straight out of my chest. I didn’t even have the chance to be disgusted by the gory bits stuck to my body–horrified because of what they called, yes, but not disgusted.
Factor Number Three that saved me from the pulping jaws of a shark in the next instants: the magnificent tatters of my ballgown costume, billowing every which way in the water around me and creating quite an effective distraction. Each train was like a decoy limb, and as eye-catching as a red cape waved at a bull.
And so in place of my actual limbs, the tatters went to tatters, shreds of ivory fabric and membrane swirling in the water all around, the carnage-that-wasn’t. It settled around me like snow, the sharks stirring the blizzard. I hauled myself straight into the ground, powdery sediment issuing up from the collision.
Good. Another diversion. I made a point to kick up as much as I could while I wriggled and shimmied and burrowed my way into the sediment. A little smoke-screen could make all the difference.
Out-think the beast. I may not have the underwater agility, all of my movements slow-motion compared to their zipping and darting finesse, but I hadn’t excelled in all of my life’s precocious endeavors because I was a dimwit.
I thought the smoke-screen was working, until a jagged maw plunged through the obscurity and caught my leg in its teeth.
I was in the middle of gouging out the sand with my foot, my knee bent upward right as the creature lunged, perfectly poised to snag on a well-aimed chomp.
A watery scream escaped my body. I was jerked from my quest for refuge on the ocean floor, dragged back up into the water. Plumes of my own blood joined the leaky bait, mixing with the stirring of sediment and turning the water a muddy, rusty brown.
I’d read somewhere once that a shark’s nose and eyes were particularly sensitive, and that, if faced with an attack, you should do your best to punch the brute in these areas. I’d always been a little skeptical of this advice, pretty sure any attempts to punch anything underwater would just result in a laughable, sloth-like form of tai-chi, but in the moment I wasn’t about to discriminate. Driven by the screaming pain, I wailed at the creature’s eyes and nose, desperate to win my release. The shark’s vise-like grip faltered once, but clamped down with renewed purchase just as quickly, and only when I remembered the headdress still crowning my skull and tore it off to stab the winged horns at the creature’s eye did my efforts actually cause the shark to release me outright.<
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Free but maimed, I made a second attempt to get to the ocean floor so I could burrow. But this wasn’t going well, and I realized I couldn’t rely solely on one method of escape. It was a worthwhile tactic, but I needed other avenues as well.
That was when my first narrow escape gave me an idea. If I was having to fight for my life up close and personal, doing whatever I could to deflect the beasts, maybe I could shove the chain down one’s throat again, and manipulate the shark into pulling my stake free.
It was a long shot, but seemed a valid way to kill two birds with one stone if I had to intercept those fangs with something, anyway.
As I reached the seabed a second time, I wrapped the chain once firmly around each hand, and shoved the taut piece at the next set of jaws that leered out of the murk at me.
Jagged teeth snagged on steel links, but all it earned me was a vicious shaking as the creature flailed its head back and forth to free its mouth. Loosening itself from the trap, the shark glided backward, wriggling off to circle around for another try.
For a good minute the adrenaline coursing through my veins numbed me to the pain of my injury, but as my deflection attempts continued and the nightmare dragged on, the agony reared its ugly head, a pulsing ache searing through my perforated leg. It was an intense distraction, sparkling across every lucid thought that campaigned to see me through the condemnation churning around me. I needed my wits to stay sharp, and the wound just made me want to curl into the fetal position and writhe in pain. But I’d have to nurse my wounds on my own time, if I ever got out of this diabolical mess.
I flattened myself against the sand just before I was charged again, and due to the consequences of the last time I’d bent a limb to help dig my way into the ground, I was laying as tight to the seabed as possible for this ambush. The shark skimmed over me, its belly all but grazing my nose.
The other two took passes at me as well, sending my heart into my throat each time, my stomach reeling with rabid butterflies. The fourth time, I worked up the nerve to thrust the chain up into the shark’s path, half sure I’d lose a hand but positive I wouldn’t make it out of this alive if I didn’t do something daring to gain the upper hand.
Clamping down on the chain, the shark towed me once again from my defensive position. I was whisked along the ocean floor under its belly, and felt the moment that the chain slack went taut and the stake was given a good yank.
Still, I jerked to a halt same as when I’d rushed irrationally toward the surface, and the shark disentangled himself and wormed away.
I took stock of the stake as I cast myself back toward the seabed, and my heart sank seeing it still essentially in the same position. It had budged, but nothing more.
Back to my snow-angel tactic, I kept my limbs flat and kicked up as much sand as I possibly could, knowing I was grinding grains into my wound but verging on hysterical from the pain and the need to escape this. I realized suddenly I was sobbing, wondering when that had started.
I was going to die here. Even if my smoke-screen managed to confuse the sharks, even if I managed to stay out of easy reach as a target flattened to the ground until they gave up, I was helpless to uproot that confounded stake, and I would still bleed to death here in the middle of nowhere, where no one knew to look for me.
And who would even miss me enough to look? I had no friends who would readily notice my absence. If Coda noticed, would he even think anything was amiss? I was probably just off seeing the sights somewhere, studying the ruins, mapping the city, experiencing the culture…
I was doomed.
Just as I began to accept my fate, a peculiar thing happened. I thought it was just a hallucination at first, due to the pain or delirium. A cloud of lavender bloomed in the obscurity, then a burst of aqua, permeating the sediment and mixing with the inky billows of blood.
Pink. Lavender. Aqua. To the left, to the right, directly above. Puffs of pastel color turned the shaken-up, ivory-tattered snow globe battlefield into a watercolor painting.
It was beautiful, I thought, relaxing against the sand as a sickly-sweet flavor coated my tongue. And then the hallucinations began in earnest. The sharks became tie-dye, saber-toothed monsters, circling in lacy, dizzying patterns. One of them charged straight down at me but stopped just short of biting my head off, and grinned a wide, crazy grin like the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. Then he opened his mouth and let out an evil laugh that bellowed into the depths, and again in true Cheshire Cat fashion, his grin slowly vanished.
In his place Codexious appeared hovering over me, half-transparent, his tail fading into nothingness above and behind him like he was some ghost leaning out of the Otherworld.
“Hold on, Stargazer,” he murmured, pastel clouds reflecting in his silver eyes. And then he leaned close and kissed me, tasting of cotton candy, and as my eyes fell shut I dreamed of carnivals, and swimming through a house of mirrors, and riding around and around for an eternity on a carousel of seahorses.
Chapter 20
I got off the carousel somewhere between Hades and Atlantis, drifting in an unconscious abyss for an indeterminate amount of time before finding my way back. When my lashes fluttered open I was lying on my back same as when the hallucinations came on, but instead of a blank canvas of sand stretching in every direction, a frame of pillars and other ruins materialized around me.
A slithery feeler crept up my neck and probed at my face, recoiling with a snap when I twitched. Groaning, I stirred, fighting a cowl of grogginess and a killer headache to crane my head up and peer down at the rest of my body.
I was sprawled out on a stone slab, a turquoise and pink blob clinging to one of my legs. Frowning, I blinked away the bleariness, and one of Atlantis’s famous watercolor octopuses came into focus.
Remembering Coda’s warnings, I nearly flinched into a fit of trying to shake the thing off, but then I realized it was my wounded leg that the creature was wrapped around, and blood no longer leaked into the water. After that curious realization, it seemed more and more like the creature was twined in a purposeful way about the limb, squeezing with a certain amount of pressure, and with much intrigue I had to admit it was a very effective kind of tourniquet.
That was one way to put pressure on a wound.
Given that the octopus was clinging so resolutely to my leg and didn’t seem interested in slinking up my body to sit on my face and suffocate me just yet, I took a moment to survey my surroundings.
Ah. The slanted platform and headless statue. I was just outside Atlantis.
My hands were still bound, and the chain meandered away from my form and pooled in a tangle on the platform, around the extent of the uprooted, loose-lolling stake.
I eyed the octopus suspiciously, recalling the clouds of color that pervaded my sandy smoke-screen in the midst of the shark feeding frenzy. And of course the hallucinations that followed; and now I was here, far away from the scene of the crime under the intense supervision of the culprit.
Had…this thing uprooted the stake after drugging me and the sharks and everything else within a ten mile radius of that psychedelic ink-fest? Octopuses were supposedly one of the strongest creatures in the sea, and I’d heard countless tales about how smart they were.
I took a second glance around the territory, a sly hunch coming to me. “You’re the one I saved. Aren’t you?” I was wracked in fatigue, and felt horrendously hung-over to boot, and my voice came out sounding like I’d been sick for a week, but I was blessedly, miraculously alive.
Thanks to this pretty, tumor-like blob, it would seem. The same one I’d spared from those juvenile bullies.
It had returned the favor. What an unexpected sweetheart.
“Huh,” I hiccupped in a delirious sort of amusement, a wave of overwhelming gratitude pooling over me. I let my head settle back against the slab, feeling a gush of hysterical laughter coming on.
Possibly the effects of the trauma. Just as possibly the effects of the ink.
Grea
t inking seas, I’m alive. I shuddered at the memory of the ordeal, at how closely I’d grazed a horrifying demise. I just wanted to lay there forever, spent and elated, but my injuries needed attention. The ocean could not be a sanitary place for an open wound. My tentacled savior was doing a marvelous job sealing the wound away from any exterior contaminants, but I wasn’t sure octopus flesh was all that sanitary either.
Besides, my hands remained bound and I still wore my gory baubles, two things I would very much like to rectify. Could I make it back into the city hampered by this ball and chain? The stake may have been freed from the ground, but it could easily still be a hundred pounds of deadweight. I’d been determined enough to run off with it in the face of certain death, but now that I was exhausted with no immediate threat, and my leg hurt enough that I didn’t even want to move, it just looked like it might be the barnacle that would break the whale’s back.
“I don’t suppose you want to carry that back into the city for me?” I asked the turquoise creature, raising my head again to assess the stake. The octopus squeezed himself flatter against my leg, shrinking away from being addressed, but didn’t relinquish his tourniquet. “You’re a handy little fellow, aren’t you?”
Since it didn’t take much effort to sit up underwater, I went ahead and tilted into an upright position–slowly, so as not to frighten off my tourniquet. Ever so slightly, I shifted my leg to test the creature’s resolve.
He stuck fast.
I swished the limb gently back and forth. He just stared at me through his knobby, ultra-serious inky eyes, refusing to be dislodged.
Okay, then. He was in it for the long haul.
“Don’t mind me, little buddy. I’m just going to…hobble back to the land of the living. You’re more than welcome to tag along–in fact, I’d be much obliged. You may very well be the only thing keeping all my blood in my body right now.”
I gave the chain a tug, and to my relief it was a manageable anchor. But bleh, I felt like a bag of rotten tomatoes, being upright. “Come along, Mr. Pus.”
Pillars of the Deep Page 16
